Designing an eCommerce website? Here is what you should know…

If you think that designing an eCommerce website is all about designing an aesthetically appealing website, then you are mistaken my dear friend. Your website is your access card for this virtual world. It performs the important task of engaging your visitors and converting them into customers, which increases your business. Follow these rules of web designing to create the perfect website.

Designing the homepage

Keep the design clean: Very bright colors, too many moving elements (like flash animation etc) and default audio are a big NO while designing your ecommerce website. Seemingly perfect to grab attention, such elements distract visitors from your main content. Use Good fonts with contrast colors, which should visible to the user. Just because you need to keep things simple here and there, doesn’t mean you can’t be bold. Symmetry of the structure, colors & fonts are very important for designing an eCommerce website which is aesthetically appealing.

Company branding is crucial: Branding is very much important to all businesses, whether it’s large or small. The design and placement of your brand’s logo contributes to a viewer’s overall opinion. Professionally designed logos catch the customer’s eye and provide a clear picture of your brand.

Smooth navigation: If a website is confusing and difficult to navigate, then your customers or the new visitors may leave and never return. (Remember it’s E-commerce website not a portfolio website). Make sure all navigation is labeled and easy to use, make it very clean and light which should increase the efficiency and appeal of the site’s navigation. The menus should always have clear wording so that customers can find where they want to go with just the click of a button.

Give Your Visitors what they want-Instantly: Sometimes online visitors are in a hurry. Even if they are not, they are impatient. Your website design must get to the things quickly and efficiently but while keeping in mind that the quick steps, which you are offering, must not lose the quality of design.

Enhance Usability: Easy to use websites are more likely to gain customer interest and grow business. You can increase usability by displaying products and service information in a clear, concise manner. We should make sure that the website has all the features, which are easily accessible to the customer/user on the site.

Reduce Loading Time: When looking for information online, nothing bother visitors more than high page loading time. Customers can be turned away completely due to this issue. Testing your website ahead of time will help you pinpoint any loading time issues, and these can be fixed before your site’s official release.

If you think that loading time is none of your concern as a designer, here is what you should know– Too many bulky elements on your web page (like heavy images) becomes the reason that slows down your website and pulls down your conversion rate. So remember to optimize the image before uploading on website. This is also a very important part of designing an eCommerce website.

Designing the Checkout Page:

Include Only Vital Fields: Use the mandatory fields not the questions, such as “How did you hear about us? Alternatively, something like that on the checkout page.

Allow Checkout As A Guest: Providing an option to check out as a guest should be standard because sometimes user does not have that much time to register. In this case, a user is much less likely to complete an order if they have to go through the process of creating an account and confirming it on their mailing address.

Remove Distractions, Not Content: Once a user is on checkout process, it means they have obviously expressed a willingness to buy that product. Remove everything that can draw away their attention from ongoing process to any other thing.

Show step by step progress: A user by myself, I always wants to know where I am, where I am going and how much longer until it is done before I will actually finish placing my order.

Build it very lightweight & simple: Time is precious to everyone. If the process takes much longer time to complete, the user will leave the website without meeting your goal. Make it lightweight & simple for the user & for your own brand reputation.

So the bottom line of designing an eCommerce website is that your website should be attractive, light weighted and has an extremely good UX.

About me: I am a full time graphic designer at Kartrocket and part time graphic designer at Taskr-an online workplace. You can checkout my profile here: Harvinder@Taskr